The Waymo v. Uber trial has shaken my confidence in self-driving cars

[FrodosNewPet]

The Waymo v. Uber trial has shaken my confidence in self-driving cars

Trust is a two-way street

https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/13/16996864/waymo-vs-uber-trial-settlement-self-driving-car-confidence

By Andrew J. Hawkins | Feb 13, 2018

Amid the avalanche of damning emails and embarrassing text messages that flowed out of the Waymo-Uber trial, what struck me the most was when ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski — Kalanick’s onetime business partner who he described in court as his “brother from another mother” — described the race to build self-driving cars as a “zero sum game.”

“We need to think through the strategy to take all the shortcuts we can,” Levandowski told Kalanick. “I just see this as a race and we need to win, second place is the first looser [sic].”

This callous attitude toward a potentially game-changing, life-saving, and paradigm-shifting technology like autonomous vehicles is extremely troubling. A pirate mentality has infected companies in the autonomous vehicle space. “Move fast and break things” may have worked as an ethos for Uber when it was trying to overcome entrenched interests like the taxi industry, but it’s exactly the opposite philosophy you want to hear from a company that wants you to ride in its driverless cars.

~ snip ~

The idea that one of the companies that has already deployed autonomous cars was actively seeking “shortcuts” and “cheat codes” should scare the shit out of everyone. These odious sentiments would never have come to light if not for the trial’s discovery process that brought so many of Uber’s underhanded tactics out into the open. Obviously, Uber’s new leadership is aware that there are trust issues and is actively seeking to claw its way back into the good graces of its users. But the company is still on a very aggressive timeline. “We will have autonomous cars on the road, I believe within the next 18 months,” new Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at a recent event in Davos. “And not as a test case, as a real [use] case out there.”

~ snip ~

Autonomous vehicle safety not only impacts the voluntary passengers. It impacts the safety of everyone in the vicinity of the vehicle. The idea of shortcuts, of bean counters looking for the fast return and first mover advantage, is contrary to the public interest.

[moondust]

1. Absolutely.

Anybody who has paid attention to the computer and smartphone industries for any length of time knows that newer products are not always compatible with older products, often leading to glitches and crashes. I'm convinced some developers no longer bother to fully test their new software, only to find out later from users that it has bugs. And that doesn't begin to address issues like hacking. None of these kinds of problems belongs in a 2000-pound torpedo traveling down a public highway at 75 mph.

I'll never go near one and can only hope one never comes near me.

[Girard442]

2. Pnambic cars.

Pnambic (NAM-bic) adj. [Acronym from the film version of the "The Wizard of Oz," originally written by Frank Baum, as the true nature of the wizard is first discovered : "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or function which, due to incomplete implementation, or to the complexity in principle or execution of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose apparent operations are wholly or partially falsified. 3. Requiring prestidigitization.

http://www.pnambic.com/Goodies/DefPnambic.html